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CHEVRON ECUADOR FRAUD EXPOSED: ATTORNEY STEVEN DONZIGER ADMITS ON FILM THAT CASE AGAINST CHEVRON IS ‘JUST A BUNCH OF SMOKE AND MIRRORS AND BULL SHIT’

Crude director Joe Berlinger (left) and attorney Steven Donziger
knowingly created deceptive movie to mislead the public and help
Donziger’s $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron

Chevron has filed a legal motion to preserve all correspondence, emails, film and other evidence between the filmmaker Joe Berlinger and attorney Steven Donziger after discovering new never-seen-before evidence of fraud in the $27 billion case against the company in Ecuador.

Filmmaker Joe Berlinger and Chevron have been in a court battle over Berlinger’s movie “Crude,” a nonfiction feature that chronicles a legal fight by personal injury attorneys who sued Texaco (now owned by Chevron) over an oil field that they said contaminated the water supply in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

On Tuesday, attorneys for Chevron presented evidence in a filing in U.S. District Court in New York that attorney Steven Donziger, the personal injury lawyer behind the lawsuit against Chevron, directed the work of Richard Stalin Cabrera, an allegedly ‘independent’ expert appointed by the Ecuadorian court to determine health and environmental damages in the case. The complete filing can be seen here.

The Chevron suit says that “The outtakes that Chevron has reviewed so far leave no doubt that Plaintiffs arranged for Cabrera’s appointment and decided what Cabrera’s report would say, and that Plaintiffs’ lawyers and their U.S. consultants—not independent experts working for Cabrera—drafted Cabrera’s initial work plan and ultimately his damages assessment in the Lago Agrio Litigation.”

The outtakes depict key members of plaintiffs’ legal and technical teams meeting with Cabrera to discuss, step by step, how the allegedly ‘independent report’ will be written and submitted to the Court in Ecuador. The members of Plaintiffs’ team present at the meeting include: Steven Donziger, lead U.S counsel for Plaintiffs, Pablo Fajardo, lead Ecuadorian counsel for Plaintiffs, Luis Yanza, representative of Amazon Defense Front; Dick Kamp, director of E-Tech; Ann Maest, a managing scientist at Stratus and E-Tech; and Charlie Champ, of Champ Science and Engineering.

Equally damaging to Donziger’s alleged case against Chevron, the boastful and arrogant attorney admits on out- takes from Berlinger’s film that “…you know, this is Ecuador. . . . You can say whatever you want and at the end of the day, there’s a thousand people around the courthouse, you’re going to get what you want. Sorry, but it’s true. Because at the end of the day, this is all for the Court just a bunch of smoke and mirrors and bullshit. It really is. We have enough, to get money, to win.”

The outtakes from the movie prove what Chevron believed all along: the entire case is fraudulent and corrupt.

Chevron won the rights to a limited amount of film footage from Berlinger’s movie “Crude” first in front of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, whose decision to allow Chevron access to the outtakes was later modified in July by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan.

Who would have guessed that Donziger and his allies would have been so arrogant, and stupid, as to make the admissions discovered in the outtakes of this film? It is equally disturbing that Berlinger, who purported to make a documentary, actually left the real story out of his film.

One has to guess from the shockingly candid outtakes that what was left out of the “Crude” movie theatrical release was done so on purpose—both Donziger and Berlinger made the movie with the intent to deceive the public. It’s too bad that Berlinger didn’t air the real story.

The outright falsehoods against Chevron become painfully clear in the legal filing by Chevron: the company is clearly the victim of a dishonest lawyer and an equally dishonest filmmaker.

A final thought: after the film outtakes have been viewed by the public, press and the Court, will CNN, the Goldman Foundation in San Francisco, Hollywood and music personalities Trudie Styler and husband Sting, and others admit that their praise and awards for Amazon Watch, Amazon Defense Coalition, Steven Donziger, Luis Yanza and Pablo Fajardo are as fake as the case against Chevron—and as fake as the movie “Crude”?

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